Erwin Rommel
Rommel was born on 15 November 1891 in Southern Germany at Heidenheim. He was the third of five children of Erwin Rommel Senior (1860–1913), a teacher and school administrator, and his wife Helene von Lutz, whose father Karl von Luz headed the local government council. As a young man Rommel's father had been a lieutenant in the artillery. At age 18 Rommel joined the local 124th Württemberg Infantry Regiment as a Fähnrich (ensign). He graduated in November 1911 and was commissioned as a lieutenant in January 1912 and was assigned to the 124th Infantry in Weingarten. He was posted to Ulm in March 1914 to the 46th Field Artillery Regiment, XIII (Royal Württemberg) Corps, as a battery commander. He returned to the 124th when war was declared. World War 1 During World War I, Rommel fought in France as well as in the Romanian and Italian Campaigns. He successfully employed the tactics of penetrating enemy lines with heavy covering fire coupled with rapid advances, as well as moving forward rapidly to a flanking position to arrive at the rear of hostile positions, to achieve tactical surprise. Battle of Caporetto In August 1917, his unit was involved in the battle for Mount Cosna, a heavily fortified objective on the border between Hungary and Romania, which they took after two weeks of difficult uphill fighting. The Mountain Battalion was next assigned to the Isonzo front, in a mountainous area in Italy. The offensive, known as the Battle of Caporetto, began on 24 October 1917. Rommel's battalion, consisting of three rifle companies and a machine gun unit, was part of an attempt to take enemy positions on three mountains: Kolovrat, Matajur, and Stol. In two and a half days, from 25 to 27 October, Rommel and his 150 men captured 81 guns and 9,000 men (including 150 officers), at the loss of six dead and 30 wounded.Rommel achieved this remarkable success by taking advantage of the terrain to outflank the Italian forces, attacking from unexpected directions or behind enemy lines, and taking the initiative to attack when he had orders to the contrary. In one instance, the Italian forces, taken by surprise and believing that their lines had collapsed, surrendered after a brief firefight. In this battle, Rommel helped pioneer infiltration tactics, a new form of maneuver warfare just being adopted by German armies, and later by foreign armies, and described by some as Blitzkrieg without tanks. He played no role in the early adoption of Blitzkrieg in World War II though. In January 1918, Rommel was promoted to Hauptmann (captain) and assigned to a staff position with XLIV Army Corps, where he served for the remainder of the war. World War II In February 1940, Rommel was named commander of the 7th Panzer division. The following year, he was appointed commander of German troops (the Afrika Korps) in North Africa. Italian losses to the British in North Africa led Adolf Hitler to send Rommel to Libya, where he laid siege to the port city of Tobruk from April to December 1941. Repulsed by the British, he returned with the Afrika Korps in June 1942 and finally took the city; this attack became known as the Battle of Gazala. Not long after, Rommel was promoted to field marshal by Hitler. Famed for leading his army from the front rather than the rear, as most generals did, for a time, Rommel enjoyed an unbroken string of successes, and earned the nickname the "Desert Fox" for his surprise attacks. He gained popularity in the Arab world as a liberator from British rule, and was regarded as both one of Hitler's most successful generals and one of Germany's most popular military leaders. At home the propaganda ministry portrayed him as the invincible “people’s marshal” (Volksmarschall). But the offensive against Egypt had overtaxed his resources. At the end of October 1942, he was defeated in the Second Battle of El-Alamein and had to withdraw to the German bridgehead in Tunis. In March 1943 Hitler ordered him home. D-Day In 1944 Rommel was entrusted with the defense of France’s Channel coast against a possible Allied invasion. The master of the war of movement then developed an unusual inventiveness in the erection of coastal defense works. From his experience in North Africa with Allied air interdiction, Rommel believed the only successful defense of the beaches lay in preventing the enemy a bridgehead by all possible means. To do so, he boldly advocated the placement of reserve forces immediately behind coastal defense works for counterattacks. His superiors, most notably Gerd von Rundstedt, demurred, however, insisting on a more traditional placement of reserves farther behind the lines to maximize the forces’ potential range of movement after the place of invasion became known. This disagreement and the dissonance it fostered within organizations charged with repelling the Allies weakened the effectiveness of the German defense when the invasion finally came along the Normandy coast. Implicated in 1944 July Plot After the Allied invasion in June 1944 and the resulting push across France, Rommel knew that Germany would lose the war and, thusly, discussed surrendering with other officers. (On D-Day—June 6, 1944—156,000 troops landed in Normandy, and invading forces eventually reached 1 million.) Some friends who had joined the clandestine opposition to Hitler approached Rommel and suggested to him that it was his duty to take over as head of state after Hitler had been overthrown. Rommel did not reject the suggestion, but the men who wanted to extricate Germany from the war never revealed to Rommel that they planned to assassinate Hitler. On July 17, 1944, at the height of the invasion battle, Rommel’s car was attacked by British fighter-bombers and forced off the road. It somersaulted, and Rommel was hospitalized with serious head injuries. In August he had recovered sufficiently to be able to return to his home to convalesce. In the meantime, after the failure of the attempt on Hitler’s life on July 20, 1944, Rommel’s contacts with the conspirators had come to light. Hitler did not want the “people’s marshal” to appear before the court as his enemy and thence be taken to the gallows. He sent two generals to Rommel to offer him poison with the assurance that his name and that of his family would remain unsullied if he avoided a trial. On October 14 Rommel took poison, thus ending his life. He was later buried with full military honours.